The Past: 1968

Around the country, it’s an explosive year. In Charlotte, tension simmers. But the city never erupts, and years of prosperity follow. Here, we recreate the story of 1968 through the eyes of an average Charlottean

By CHUCK MCSHANE

Published: 2013.08.16 01:30 PM

(page 2 of 4)

Brooklyn. They called it a slum. In some spots, that was true. Near the Little Sugar Creek bottom, narrow, clapboard houses were packed tightly together as children played in muddy, unpaved streets. Some of the houses had no indoor plumbing.

The Troublemakers

It started with a story about a teddy bear. Not a children’s story, but a sexually suggestive tale that concluded with the line, “Is there a hole in your teddy bear?” East Mecklenburg High School’s literary magazine refused to print it, so the 11th-grade author, Tom Wilkinson, and his friends decided to publish it themselves.
This is one of the creation stories behind Inquisition, the underground magazine that began publishing in 1968. Wilkinson and his fellow editors, including Russell Schwarz and Lynwood Sawyer, were juniors at East Meck. They bonded over their long hair and aversion to following the herd. “We were not interested in uniformity,” Schwarz says.
“We were interested in causing as much trouble as possible,” Wilkinson adds.
After a local church donated them an old printing press, Inquisition editors installed it in Schwarz’s mother’s tool shed. Printing was complicated: Someone had to spread the ink with a spatula while another person held the paper so it wouldn’t get stuck in the machine. Sawyer would bang out text on the typewriter; all the art was hand-drawn. When they finished printing each issue, the teens held stapling parties to bind the final product—sometimes 2,000 copies at 40 pages each. None of which they took too seriously.
“One issue we misspelled Inquisition,” Wilkinson remembers. Still, the subjects the magazine addressed—inequality between schools in black and white neighborhoods, dodging the draft, smoking marijuana—were controversial enough to anger the school board and other powers-that-be in Charlotte. “We were anti-war, anti-Nixon, and pro-drugs,” Schwarz says. The city tried to shut down the magazine, arguing that running a printing press in a neighborhood tool shed was a violation of the residential zoning code. But an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer sued the city on behalf of the teenagers, arguing the city was infringing on their First Amendment rights. And they won. That was the editors’ favorite moment—beating the bozos, as Schwarz calls it.
“When you’re young and crazy, it was fun.” —Lisa Rab

But farther up Stonewall Street toward Brevard were black-owned shops, a movie theater, and houses for black doctors and lawyers and the preachers of two dozen churches. For James Ross, taking the bus to Brevard Street as a boy in the 1950s was like stepping “out of segregation and into freedom.” But that’s mostly gone now or soon to be gone. Only a handful of houses and the still-segregated Second Ward High School remain, replaced by car dealerships and the Charlottetowne Mall.

Seventy-seven-year-old John Mobley is the neighborhood’s last resident. He refuses to move from the shack on Bell Court he owned for decades until he gets the $2,000 he says it’s worth. “If they paid me, I’d be gone.” Problem is, he doesn’t own it anymore. He fell behind on taxes a few years back. A couple of city police officers bought the land for $1,000, then sold it back to the city’s urban development authority for $5,000. Someone got paid.

The water’s been off for a year. Mobley carries empty cartons to fill up at a church each morning. Even his lawyer says he doesn’t have a case.

Back in the late 1950s, politicians and the newspapers promoted “slum clearance” as a good thing. Brooklyn was too dense. Too old. Too rundown. Too black. For folks like Mobley, it was home. Now the 1,000 or so families and 216 business owners scramble for new places to stay. They fan out to First Ward and Belmont and Biddleville. The whispers start in white neighborhoods on the north and west sides: “They’re coming; sell while you can.” Realtors see dollar signs. They plant black families in vacant houses and wait for their panicked white neighbors to sell at steep discounts. Then they advertise the suburban dream to the same black families and their friends—at a steep markup, of course.

Brooklyn’s demise leaves a bad impression among many. Urban renewal is nothing but black removal, they say. There is hope amid disappointment, though. Charlotte dentist Reginald Hawkins is running for North Carolina governor in the Democratic primary—the first black gubernatorial candidate in the 20th century.